Searching for sanctuary in Idaho (Boise, Pocatello: house prices, buying, income)

[Clark Fork Fantast]

Do an Idaho Forum search on Lewiston. Lowest point in the state, warmest winters, but the paper mill...

[NW Crow]

I dunno the water situation in and around Lewiston. But the presence of a big river doesn't mean equal access to it or access at all. Check, don't assume.

[nowhereman427]

Originally Posted by cleosmom

The way I see it Boise is out, it's the largest city and leans left.

I'm guessing you don't want to live in the mountains, that's where the majority of the snow hits.

Basically, you might want to eyeball Twin Falls, Pocatello, Idaho Falls and well the Snake River valley.

Yes I agree....Plus Boise prices have skyrocked

[banjomike]

Prices have also skyrocketed in Idaho Falls, Twin Falls, and Pocatello. It's not just the prices; I've never seen Idaho Falls in a housing shortage like this one.

I think Covid really escalated a lot of conditions that were already building before it showed up.

But, really, I don't know very much about why it is Old Mother Idaho, the state everyone thinks is Iowa all my life, and is still only widely known for its humble potatoes, has suddenly become so immensely superior as a desirable home state destination.

[2011KTM530]

I was talking to an old coworker who still lives in California. Everyone around in her neighborhood that is selling is moving to Idaho. 100%, that’s both shocking and different than in the past.

[Curly Q. Bobalink]

Originally Posted by banjomike

Prices have also skyrocketed in Idaho Falls, Twin Falls, and Pocatello. It's not just the prices; I've never seen Idaho Falls in a housing shortage like this one.

I think Covid really escalated a lot of conditions that were already building before it showed up.

But, really, I don't know very much about why it is Old Mother Idaho, the state everyone thinks is Iowa all my life, and is still only widely known for its humble potatoes, has suddenly become so immensely superior as a desirable home state destination.

Well, it is a pretty state, with weather that is mountainous / northern, but still friendly to agriculture in the valleys, unlike, say, Wyoming, which is at a much higher average altitude. The winters can be cold, but again, better than those on the east side of the Divide, since they don't get the "dip" in the jet stream from Canada, that makes the winter lows miserable all the way down to the bottom of Kansas. I had a friend move to Pocatello from Chicago in about 2016 for a job opportunity, he loves it out there. I've kicked around the idea of retirement between Kennewick and Lewiston, I had a vacation planned for 2020 to go out there, but we all know how that turned out.

I've been reading now for at least twenty years that northern Idaho was considered the "last stand" for conservatives to move, with the state being 2A friendly, and being not so friendly to the forces that just tore up Portland and Seattle. Boise, obviously, has "benefitted" greatly from the exodus from California, makes you wonder if the state won't have it's own culture war in the future. I was last there in about 2012, drove up from Jackpot, NV through Twin Falls to Fort Hall, where I actually returned with more quarters in my pocket than I went in with (others in the family weren't quite so lucky, LOL). A lot of the lower portion of the state looks similar to Nevada, which can be a good or bad thing depending on your temperament. I still remember a trip to Bear Lake as a kid, probably the prettiest blue water I've ever seen.

I have to wonder if any of Idaho's water is bound by treaty? From the maps, it looks like the majority of it goes from the Snake into the Columbia and then into the Pacific, where it doesn't do anyone much good. Tremendous resource, there, makes one wonder if some of it couldn't be piped down into Nevada (to make up for water diverted to Vegas). For a price, of course.

[banjomike]

The water isn't bound by treaty, and there's a lake of it under the Arco desert that's the size of Lake Erie. It's a huge aquifer and one of the most unusual, in that the water moves through it so fast and continuously it's almost a sub-surface river. Not at all like the typical aquifer.
But that's Idaho for ya. The Lost River is actually lost when it falls down a great crack in the lava and all its water joins the aquifer.
...and then emerges to go back into the Snake once more at 10,000 Springs, about 150 miles down stream.

The problem with the water is once it's in the aquifer, it all has one state title after another on it. Our water rights are so securely tethered to grandfather clauses that owning the water rights on a property could well prove to be more financially important than the land is.

The fact that the water ends up in the Snake and the Snake empties into the Columbia is actually the most vital to the entire intermountain west, from Wyoming to the coast.

At the convergence, the Snake is the mightiest river of the pair, and she's the mother of more waters than the Columbia. The Snake waters Wyoming, Idaho, both north and south, Washington, Oregon, and feeds water to Montana, Nevada, and Utah.

She has 2 sources; the Henry's fork, from Big Springs close to the wyoming/Montana border in the north, and the South Fork, the drainage of Lake Yellowstone inside the national park.

The vast supply comes from Rocky Mountain snowpack. The only mountains in the U.S. that are large and cold enough to hold such snow. The Rockies will always have snow falling on them in the winters.

So owning land with clear title close to the Snake's headwaters is like owning shares in a liquid gold mine.

None of that water could ever go to California. Moving it southwest would require more lift over the High Sierras than can be done.

De-salinization is the best way for S. Cali to have a new water source. The ocean is right there, close to the need, and the technology exists, as does the electricity supply. There's even a dry channel running through the heart of the need that can be used for delivery.

[volosong]

Originally Posted by banjomike

De-salinization is the best way for S. Cali to have a new water source. The ocean is right there, close to the need, and the technology exists, as does the electricity supply. There's even a dry channel running through the heart of the need that can be used for delivery.

SoCal doesn't really have an abundant electricity supply. Very, very little hydroelectric power, unlike the PacNW. Just one nuclear plant still up and running, (and who know for how long that will continue). Some power is transmitted from Hoover Dam, and more and more from solar in the deserts. However, all in all, too much population will result in a tight electricity availability into the foreseeable future.

[Curly Q. Bobalink]

Originally Posted by volosong

SoCal doesn't really have an abundant electricity supply. Very, very little hydroelectric power, unlike the PacNW. Just one nuclear plant still up and running, (and who know for how long that will continue). Some power is transmitted from Hoover Dam, and more and more from solar in the deserts. However, all in all, too much population will result in a tight electricity availability into the foreseeable future.

All the more reason for them to come to terms with their environmental aspirations. Oftentimes, what looks good on paper doesn't work so well in reality. Maybe the answer to their power problems will be the same answer to the fires that happen from high voltage lines crossing so much forested area and the brownouts from shutting this power off during storms; to produce power closer to where it is consumed. Unfortunately, due to the earthquake risks in the state, nuclear may not be the best answer for them, I sure do hope solar continues to improve.

Banjomike, thank you for the excellent information, I'll probably read your post for the third time to let more of it sink in. I was told by an Engineer once that the aquifer we tapped in Northern Illinois was fed by Lake Superior, I was amazed by that (if it's true, LOL). I agree on California desalination, it could be paid for by re-allocation of some of their Lower Basin water from the Colorado, if Arizona keeps growing, they're going to need more water eventually.

Good on Idaho for not giving their water rights away, as Wyoming did as an "Upper Basin State". I wonder if there was a sunset clause on the Colorado River Compact, or whether it exists into perpetuity, something to research (maybe it was tied to the Fed's ownership of so much land in Wyoming). There's SO much to learn about the western states, and so much history.

[banjomike]

Hi, Curly...
Idaho o has always been a dry state from top to bottom. Without our abundant snowpack, most of the state would be in permanent water shortage, and it was for a very long time; from 1864 to the late 1940s, the size and depth of our aquifer was unknown, and it's deeper than most of the domestic wells the hat were drilled needed to be.

I often say here the first water is quite often not the best water. Idaho's subterranean rock structures are all so porous or so fractured that the water they store is scattered everywhere underground, and no one knows for sure what feeds it or where it comes from.
So for at least 85 years, every water user presumed the only water that existed here was the stuff they could see. (Naturally enough; most of our observations of nature are true.)

But deep-well irrigation, along with the creation of the INL, changed that perception radically. Folks knew the aquifer existed long, long ago, but they never knew how large it was, how much water was in it, or how fast the water circulates in it.

Deep well irrigation itself created the need for secure water rights and claims. All those big pivot lines with their sprinklers one can see from the Interstates didn't exist until the 1960s, and many of those spud fields they water were still native steppe covered with sagebrush or native long-grass prairie back then.

The Idaho potato crop then was only 1/3 as large as it is now, or less. Vulcanism, the force that makes the aquifer what it is and our potatoes as tasty as they are, made irrigation very difficult in this naturally arid climate.

Spuds have a lot of nicknames that indicate their economic importance to Idaho. "Famous Potatoes" is the most polite, and was at first more of a hope than a secure declaration of fact.

With surface irrigation, a spud crop quality could be excellent, but the yield could be low. The crop needed careful, continuous attention to be both good and high yielding, but the equipment investment didn't have to be especially high.

The same equipment that was used on sugar beets could be used with potatoes. The beets were a hardier crop, one more resistant to early freeze or the blights that afflict potatoes, and spuds didn't make a farmer wealthy- sugar beets did, for many decades.

Beet sugar demanded high equipment investment, but the crop yield was so massive it justified the investment and killed the demand for the higher-cost cane sugar. Cane sugar was cheaper to turn into refined sugar, but demanded more human labor and had more limited crop yield.

So it was with potatoes. Once they were watered by sprinklers that delivered moisture precisely that was all uniformly cold and clean, Huge yields became common, and one good year could pay so high a farmer could ride out 3-4 bad years of low prices with no problems.

The sugar beet paid dependably, but never as high as spuds. If a farmer was a gambler, and lots of them are, he could turn his middle-class life into millionaire territory if he risked everything, drilled deep wells, invested in the electric power, the underground main water lines and the above-ground pivots and wheel line sprinklers.
And they all worked and paid off as planned. A good gross farm income on a large productive farm went from $300-500,000 yr. to $3 million yr.
Farmed by lots of Mormons, who do not normally gamble, but sure did when they began growing spuds.
Lose one crop and all was lost. Hit pay dirt on a good price year and become the richest man in the state.
Or the Governor. Or a Senator, or an industrialist.

Spuds needed the water, and the water was worth fighting over. Spuds became known as "Mormon cocaine" because the growers couldn't quit them, even when one year after another and another all failed to pay off.

Any year COULD pay off. As long as the farmer had the rights to enough water to irrigate his spuds. If that was lost, he might as well sell the farm and go to work in the spud house he once owned.

That's why Idaho's water is still mostly under Idaho's control. If Northrop and Grumman had decided to build airplanes here instead of California, that story would have had a different ending.